The cameras assigned to follow the contestants whirled frantically in every direction, and the images on the giant screens became fragmented as the footage constantly switched between the Material World and the Speed Force Plane, clearly searching for the missing Flash.
But they found nothing. Logically, after crossing that long asteroid belt, the contestant should have returned to the Speed Force Plane from the other end. Yet Barry had vanished in an instant.
Something had happened during the race, so naturally it could not continue. The other contestants all passed through the obstacle zone without incident and returned to the venue through the Speed Force Plane.
Most areas within the Speed Force Plane did not allow anyone to stop. You absolutely could not come to a halt there.
In ordinary regions, if you were not fast enough, you could fall out of the Speed Force Plane at any moment. You might fall into the Bleed Layer and be corroded into a mass of energy, or land in some utterly unfamiliar Timeline or Parallel World. You could even fall into a story that had never happened and did not exist, because that fell within the conceptual scope of Hypertime.
There were plenty of even more terrifying possibilities. For example, being caught by Black Flash and dying without a whole body left behind; or being pursued by another version of yourself from a different Timeline, triggering Flashpoint. No one could say for sure.
People discussed it heatedly. The other Barrys who had raced alongside the Flash began exchanging information, but they had been a few steps slower than their Earth-0 brother and had seen nothing at all.
Even Quicksilver, who had come in second, had discovered nothing. To speedsters, let alone half a body length, even a difference of one millimeter meant